How We Built the Internet

The internet is like water—we take its existence for granted, but its birth was by no means pre-ordained. A constellation of inventors, organizations, and efforts all contributed to its creation. In one of her signature deep dives, Contrary writer Anna-Sofia Lesiv excavates the history of digital communication infrastructure, from the invention of the telephone to the widespread installation of fiber-optic cable and big tech’s subsidization of undersea cables. Read this chronicle to understand how the internet’s decentralized origins led to its current state as fractured spaces governed by private entities—and its implications for its future accessibility. —Kate Lee 

The internet is a universe of its own. For one, it codifies and processes the record of our society’s activities in a shared language, a language that can be transmitted across electric signals and electromagnetic waves at light speeds.

The infrastructure that makes this scale possible is similarly astounding—a massive, global web of physical hardware, consisting of more than 5 billion kilometers of fiber-optic cable, more than 574 active and planned submarine cables that span a over 1 million kilometers in length, and a constellation of more than 5,400 satellites offering connectivity from low earth orbit (LEO). 

According to recent estimates, 328 million terabytes of data are created each day. There are billions of smartphone devices sold every year, and although it’s difficult to accurately count the total number of individually connected devices, some estimates put this number between 20 and 50 billion.

“The Internet is no longer tracking the population of humans and the level of human use. The growth of the Internet is no longer bounded by human population growth, nor the number of hours in the day when humans are awake,” writes Geoff Huston, chief scientist at the nonprofit Asia Pacific Network Information Center.